This gadget does exactly as promised: it looks like a thumbdrive (sort of) and fries the circuitry of any computer it’s plugged into. It’s made from camera flash parts, is charged with a standard AA battery, and delivers a 300V zap of DC destruction to the port for all your USB-murdering needs. Note that this […]

The Cobham catalog, exposed by The Intercept, features countless pages of surveillance gadgets sold to U.S. police to spy on American citizens: tiny black boxes with a big interest in you. In the creepily bland feature lists and nerdy product names is a whisper of a dark future; perhaps darker than anyone can imagine.

This image depicts the most commonly-found stylesheet colors on the web’s top sites—Paul Hebert did an amazing amount of analysis and this is just one of the intriguing visualizations he came up with. Most of these are obvious staples, especially HTML red and blue, though it’s interesting how far the blue “cluster” is from the […]

The Boing Boing Store’s Gift Guide is full of ideas for pretty much anyone in your life like hipster ice cub trays, Xbox controllers, Halo Boards, and even diamond necklaces. As always, all products in the Boing Boing Store come at great discounts, too. Shop by price bucket starting at under $20. Under $20:Bloxx Jumbo Ice Trays […]

Unlike traditional lighters, the SaberLight features an electronic plasma beam that’s both rechargeable and butane-free. This sleek lighter is even approved by TSA, so you’ll never be stuck buying lighters you’ll just have to throw away partially used. For some people, like me, this is a pretty big game-changer. The SaberLight’s beam is actually both hotter and cleaner […]

Holiday shopping is in full swing, and the Striiv Touch is one of the best gift ideas I’ve landed on. Its simple design works for females and males, and its wide range of features makes it suitable for even the non-fitness enthusiasts in your life.Unlike traditional fitness trackers, the Striiv Touch also acts as a smartwatch. It […]

Yeah… its a pretty depressing history. The only medical “expert” that Anslinger brought to testify to congress was a vet who straight-up lied about weed’s “irreversible” effects on dogs. Meanwhile a doctor from the AMA testified to say that criminalising weed would halt any research into it as an effective and cheap medicine, and that there was no evidence that it presented a public health issue.

Did you also know that during the Clinton and Bush years TV and movie producers were able to cash-in to the tune of million of dollars for inserting anti-marijuana messages into their scripts? The history of the misinformation war on marijuana is simply dumbfounding and US taxpayers have been funding it, on behalf of the alcohol industry, for far too long.

Never once heard of a stoned father beating and raping their daughter*. Sorry, bub. You’re going to have to do a little better than that. Unless you’d like to argue about how crazy and out of control Colorado and Washington have become.

*have heard of this and many other horror stories of those under the influence of alcohol, it is easily one of man’s worst evils

The foreword is written by an ex cop who makes the EXACT point you do and it provides a wealth of facts to shoot down the tired roll call of ignorance that anti drug advocates trot out to make their argument.

You think that’s bad. How about the NYTimes’ Judith Miller and her love affair with the Iraq war and the quest for WMD’s? Tom Friedman, too. This was just one family going “insane.” What about the 100K fatalities, and billions of dollars going down the rat hole?

I don’t know if you’re getting the context. The Times didn’t kill this family the way the Iraq conflict did. Instead, it was complicit in Anslinger’s lying propaganda machine, which provided a launching point for the war on drugs, which has led to immeasurable fatalities, millions incarcerated, and a trillion dollars (and counting) down the rat hole.

Yep, there it is, Reefer Madness.
Oh, and of course it “happened” conveniently far enough away so that it would be highly improbable that anyone in 1927 would or could disprove the article. Seems classic, doesn’t it? So who wrote it, Judith Miller’s grandmother?

D. metel is one of the 50 fundamental herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine, where it is called yáng jīn huā (洋金花). However, the ingestion of D. metel in any form is dangerous and should be treated with extreme caution.

That Mexican family should stop growing PCP in the garden if they are going to randomly eat it all, or at least grow more marijuana to help them chill the hell out after mega dosing on the horse tranquilizer.

There is a wealth of such drug stories in the early 20th century, usually involving marijuana for hispanics and cocaine for blacks. It’s pretty clear the whole motivation for drug prohibition was fundamentally racism, not the conspiracy theories that cheap hemp would put newspaper conglomerates out of business, or that biofuels were a threat to nascent oil companies. Time and time again, there are stories, from the 1890s on, of how drugs make minorities go on killing rampages against whites.

I’m pretty sure, based on what I’ve read, that the main motivation was Hearst and friends keeping the paper empire, and other corporate interests who were threatened by hemp as a commodity. They used the racist stories and myths to influence the politicians/public, because it worked well to scare the racist masses into supporting cannabis prohibition. Racism was the tool, but the motivation was money, pure and simple.

And this was the respectable New York Times, not even Hearst’s papers which were leading the anti-Mexican anti-Chinese anti-black drug war scares of the time, and which had been the main instigators of the Spanish-American War.

Was it common grammatical practice back then to use “go” instead of “goes” in a case like this, e.g. when talking about “family” as a substitute for a plurality of family members? Because that read really…weird to my 21st century eyes when I saw that headline.

As Antinous points out above, it’s weird to your American eyes. British & Australian English habitually treats groups of people as plural conceptually, even in this bright, chrome-edged future.

Here’s a lengthy LanguageLog post on, in fact, plural vs singular verbs used with “family”. To my ears, “family goes insane” sounds very weird – the family didn’t go insane, the members did (of course they didn’t either but that’s not a grammatical issue!)

Bands and sports teams are similar: I would say “Coldplay are overrated” – in fact “Coldplay is overrated” sounds really weird to me.

Thanks! That article is really illuminating and I found myself nodding in agreement with his assessment/preference for using both forms in the Thanksgiving example. Funny how regional convention so defines the contours of our thoughts.

Alcohol has always been the skeleton in the closet. Ever wonder why you buy a jar of peanut butter the label tells you EVERYTHING, but you can buy a bottle of Thunderbird (grape juice with 20% grain alcohol and an unknown percentage of ether–latter is trace element in natural wines, thus allowed) and there’s NO label? Err…liquor-industry lobby?

As for social problems linked to THC, ask yourself this: you’re part of a two-person police crew patrolling a neighborhood. At 1:00 AM, two calls come in: one is a disturbance at a bar, the other a disturbance at a private residence where the caller “smells marijuana smoke.”

Which one do you choose? The one with brawling drunks and pool cues (or worse), or the one where a cheery shout of “Dude! The pizza’s here!” greets your doorbell-ring?